The American investment app Robinhood, which went public this week, is extremely popular with young people, who are investing en masse. There are also more and more robinhoods in our country, a special peripheral phenomenon of the corona pandemic. ‘Our customers are getting younger and younger’, the brokers say.
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“In January 2020, 13 percent of our customers were under the age of 30. Today it is 20 percent,” says Bolero, KBC’s online broker. It’s not just teens and twenties who discover the stock market. ‘A lot of investors between the ages of 30 and 40 have also joined. In 2016 the average age of the Bolero customer was 50 years, for new customers it is now 39 years.’
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Competitor Binck sees a similar rejuvenation of the clientele. ‘While at the end of 2019 we still had an average age of 45 years, that is barely a year and a half later, 39 years.’ The same voice at Lynx: ‘We see significantly more people in their twenties and thirties than five years ago.’
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Brokers see young people flocking
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In a large-scale study on the Belgian retail investor, the stock market watchdog FSMA recently noted that the number of transactions from investors under the age of 50 increased significantly during the first lockdown. In Belgium, 45,000 investors joined at the start of the corona crisis, and another 26,000 in the first quarter of 2021. “A large proportion of these are young people,” said FSMA president Jean-Paul Servais.
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Stock exchange veteran Gert Bakelants of the weekly magazine De Belegger calls the massive influx of young investors a good thing. ‘It is good that young people are getting acquainted with the fair. We’ve been saying for years that a savings account makes you poorer because inflation eats your money away. The fact that young people build up their wealth by investing is positive.’
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Criticism
The robinhoods are also criticized. They’ve made headlines as meme stock hype drivers like the shaky video game seller GameStop and the debt-laden American movie theater chain AMC. On forums like Reddit, young investors are said to be pushing each other to make quick money with those stocks.
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“Saying it’s a bunch of gamblers is too easy,” says Bakelants. ‘They may make a purchase faster, but that is also due to the tools that exist now. In my day, you couldn’t buy a stock as quickly as you were sitting on the toilet. Because of these trendy tools, young people may still see investing as a game, but I am confident that this will become a new generation of serious investors.’
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Young people may still see investing as a game, but I am confident that this will become a new generation of serious investors.